The Song of the Orphans

by Daniel Price

  Zack’s concentration was thrown by a sudden noise—a low, gurgling chuckle. Esis and Semerjean looked at Rebel with furrowed brows. Despite his broken mouth and horrid future, he’d somehow managed to smile. His mechanical hand contracted with a whirr, until only his middle finger was extended.

  Semerjean looked to his wife with groaning eyes. “Even now, the idiot—”

  “Sehcouer!”

  Zack had already noticed the sluggishness of Rebel’s prosthetic, as if something was gumming up the hydraulics. What he didn’t know was that Rebel had stuffed ten ounces of Wild-9 explosive into his wrist, then set a detonation pulse to a very specific hand gesture.

  It was the very last trick Rebel had up his sleeve, and it was a good one.

  His arm exploded with a fiery roar. Half the mirrors in the vault fell crashing to the ground, along with Semerjean and Esis.

  The shock of the explosion nearly stopped Zack’s heart. Gasping, he studied the casualties on the floor. Rebel lay near the entrance in a motionless heap, his body twisted and blackened beyond recognition.

  Esis was in much better shape. Though her clothes were torn and splattered with blood, the rest of her seemed perfectly fine. Her foresight had only given her a half-second notice of the hell that was coming, enough for her to grow a tempic skin.

  She melted her armor away, then grimaced at the mess.

  “Ju’a nonné-se . . .” She looked to Semerjean. “Amora?”

  Semerjean cursed in perfect English as he clambered to his knees. Unlike Esis, he’d lost nearly all his precognition to terminus. He had no idea what was happening until he heard his wife scream.

  Esis looked at him in horror. “My love!”

  “Huh?”

  He cast a mirror image of himself, then let out a cry. His face and chest had been cut up by metal shards. His right arm had been burned on one side and shredded on the other.

  Semerjean raised his hand and eyed the stumps of his three missing fingers. “No! No!”

  Screaming, he jumped to his feet and reversed Rebel an hour. Though the temporis was more than enough to restore Rebel’s body, his mind and soul—the very parts of him that Semerjean wanted to hurt—were irretrievably lost. He’d gone to a place where even the Pelletiers couldn’t reach him. He had escaped them for good.

  Semerjean smashed a mirror in rage. “Zhii-tah no-ma béyoe nüa!”

  Esis tried to examine his wounds, only to get pushed away. “No gu’e eillá na-ho-niel!” she yelled.

  “Li’zhii t’ua ha-já! Ellon-è! Ellon!”

  Just when Zack thought (or hoped, at the very least) that the two of them would come to blows, they suddenly remembered his presence.

  “Don’t,” Semerjean warned him. “Don’t you dare say a word!”

  Esis waved her hand in a taut circle. A ball of light enveloped her and Semerjean. By the time Zack unshielded his eyes, they were both gone, along with a big round chunk of the floor.

  “God . . .”

  He looked at Rebel, resting peacefully on the concrete. His lips had formed a hint of a smile, as if he’d planned all this from the very beginning.

  “You crazy shit,” Zack mumbled. “That was one hell of a stunt. Wherever you are, I hope you saw their reaction.”

  He sank to the floor and breathed a tired sigh. “Hope you and Ivy are having a good laugh about it.”

  Zack reached out to Mercy and checked her pulse again. She was still alive, thank God, but he couldn’t imagine for one minute that—

  A spherical portal filled the center of the room. Semerjean and Esis returned in a flash. Their clothes had changed. Their wounds were healed. They even looked well rested, as if they’d spent two weeks recovering from Rebel’s bomb.

  In point of fact, they’d taken five.

  Semerjean plucked some lint from his sleeve, then bathed Zack in a charming smile. “Let’s try this again.”

  —

  Four hundred feet away, in a dank and narrow passage beneath the cottages of Freak Street, Mia and Carrie abruptly changed direction. They’d been wandering aimlessly through the tunnels when Rebel’s bomb went off. The thunderous noise was all the compass Mia needed.

  “Are we sure we’re going the right way?” Carrie asked Mia. “That sounded like government stuff, not Esis stuff.”

  Mia clasped her hand and kept running. She could feel the powerful presence of a three-dimensional portal in the distance. There was no doubt about it. The Pelletiers were up ahead, and so was Zack.

  Hang on, Mia pleaded. Just hang on.

  —

  “Zack, I don’t think you’re listening to me.”

  He wasn’t listening at all. Between the ringing in his ears and his many scattered thoughts, Zack didn’t have the space to process Semerjean’s blather. Half the voices in his head howled madly in panic. The other half shouted ill-advised strategies. Rift them! Hurt them! Sweep them in the legs! Run out to the hallway and grab Rebel’s gun!

  “Zack!”

  He stared up at Semerjean from his perch on the floor. “What?”

  “I said you made a good point. We’ve had some time to think about it and we realize you were right. We don’t understand you.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Zack closed his eyes, exasperated. “Just shut up and kill me already.”

  Esis looked at her husband skeptically. “Ju’a no-ecù.”

  “It’s all right,” Semerjean said. “He has yet to see, but he will.”

  Zack took a quick moment to study Esis, all the curious new aspects of her appearance. Her hair had been straightened. Her skin bore a healthy tan. Most jarring of all was the change in her expression: a new peace of mind, a sanity. Wherever she went on her twelve-second vacation, it had done her a world of good.

  Semerjean created an elaborate tempic bench, then sat down in front of Zack. “Where Esis and I come from, they call this age the Gel’lebrantia: the Pre-Enlightenment Era. It began in 1912 with the introduction of temporis and ended four hundred years later, when humanity finally abandoned its linear perceptions and became true multidimensional beings.”

  Zack snorted derisively. Semerjean cocked his head. “What?”

  “‘Two Earths are nothing in the infinite spectrum,’” Zack echoed. “‘A minuscule sacrifice.’”

  “Those were my wife’s words to you.”

  “Yeah.” Zack shot a seething look at Esis. “That’s ‘enlightenment.’”

  Esis paced behind Semerjean, her face a stoic mask. “G’hie ma’tta no-lün.”

  “Did she forget how to speak English?”

  “I respectfully asked her not to engage you,” Semerjean said. “If you have any sense of self-preservation—”

  “Self-preservation?”

  “—you’ll keep a civil tongue.”

  “Fuck civil. I already know you’re going to kill me.”

  “Perhaps not.”

  “What?”

  Semerjean smiled teasingly. “Do I have your attention now?”

  He created a second tempic bench out of thin air. Zack climbed off the floor and warily faced him from the other seat.

  “I was wrong,” Semerjean confessed. “I thought I understood you people, but I was just fooling myself. I don’t know what it’s like to have your limited perceptions, to live life one string at a time. I don’t know how it feels to have my world destroyed, or to worry that each day is my last. I used to get so angry at you and the others for not thinking logically, but I realize now that I was putting an unfair burden on you. I was expecting you to act like rational beings when your circumstances have given you every reason not to.”

  Zack looked away, scowling. A less civil man might have told “David” where to stick his condescending apology.

  Semerjean crossed his legs and took a casual gander at Mercy. “You did a remar
kable job, by the way.”

  “What?”

  “Your girlfriend. Your healed her beautifully. No rifting. No over-reversing. No long-term side effects at all that I can see. You’ve really evolved with your power.” He turned to his wife. “Isn’t that impressive?”

  Esis pursed her lips with grudging politeness, as if she was being asked to praise the drawing of a dear friend’s toddler. “Yes. Very nice.”

  Zack rubbed his aching temples. “What do you want from me?”

  “We want you to make a child with Mercy,” Semerjean told him. “That’s all we ever wanted from you.”

  “So take our goddamn DNA and—”

  Semerjean flipped his hand. “I already went over this extensively with Mia. I’m not explaining it again. Suffice it to say we want a natural conception.”

  “Except you gave up on us.”

  “You gave up,” Semerjean said. “The moment you figured out what we wanted, the strings changed for the worse. There was almost no chance of you and Mercy cooperating with us. This is why we were discreet about our plans. This is why David existed at all.”

  He waved his finger and summoned four images into the air, the hazy ghosts of Zack, Amanda, Mercy, and Peter. “Fortunately, I’ve had time to rethink my strategy. I came up with a solution that even Esis accepts, a formal arrangement with no hidden caveats.”

  Zack didn’t like where this was going. “What are you talking about?”

  Semerjean enlarged the lumic images of Zack and Amanda. “I’ll be honest. I don’t understand this obsession you two have for each other. But since these feelings of yours keep hindering our plans, and since our current approach has proven ineffective, the best we can offer is incentive.”

  “Incentive,” Zack parroted. “You mean we get to keep living.”

  “Better,” Semerjean said. “You get to keep each other.”

  He smiled at Zack’s blinking disbelief. “I understand that you’re—”

  “Bullshit.”

  “—skeptical. But it’s really quite simple.” Semerjean pointed at Mercy. “Two nights a month, when she’s at peak ovulation, you try to conceive a child with her. And two nights a month, when Amanda’s at peak ovulation, she tries to conceive a child with Peter. The rest of the time, the two of you can be together. You can live together, sleep together, entwine to your heart’s content—”

  “As long as you’re careful,” Esis stipulated.

  “As long as you’re very careful,” Semerjean stressed. “We would be extremely displeased if you got Amanda pregnant.”

  Zack leaned back and examined Semerjean’s benches, these elaborate constructs with slats and bolts and lavish Gothic “ironwork.” Amanda had once joked about the ridiculously ornate things David would make if he were a tempic. She had him pegged. Even now, she had the son of a bitch pegged.

  “This is the offer we should have made to you weeks ago,” Semerjean said to Zack. “It’s the best course for all of us. If you agree—”

  “Fine.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll do it,” Zack said. “I can’t speak for the others, but I’m in.”

  The room fell quiet. Esis narrowed her eyes suspiciously. “He lies.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  “He has no intention of honoring the agreement.”

  Semerjean stood up. “Love—”

  “He accepts too quickly!”

  Zack threw his hands up. “You’re giving me the choice between death and two girlfriends. How much time do you think I need?”

  The Pelletiers stared at him inscrutably a moment before Semerjean roared with laughter. Even Esis couldn’t escape the humor of Zack’s retort. A slanted smile curled her lip and, before she knew it, she was guffawing with her husband.

  Mia crept down the tunnel, baffled by the nearby sounds of laughter. She was just about to peek into the mirror vault when Carrie clutched her arm.

  What? Mia mouthed.

  Carrie pulled a cracked hand mirror from the wall and gave it to her. Breathless, she kneeled on the ground and aimed the glass by the doorway. Her heart lurched when she saw Rebel’s corpse in the reflection, just six feet inside the room. A twist to the left revealed Semerjean, Esis, and Zack. Only the Pelletiers were having a mighty laugh. Zack looked ready to stab them both.

  “You see?” Semerjean said to Esis. “I told you he was funny.”

  Zack gritted his teeth. “Fuck you. How would you like it if I forced you into an open marriage?”

  “We already have one,” Semerjean said. “And you should be more grateful. A minute ago, your death was assured. Now you have your life and Amanda.”

  Mia had barely had a breath to process their conversation before a woman’s voice hailed her from the periphery of her senses.

  “Mia . . .”

  Puzzled, she looked to Carrie and whispered. “Did you hear that?”

  “Hear what?” Carrie whispered back.

  Zack rose from the bench and furiously paced the floor. “I don’t even know if Amanda and Mercy will go for it. I wouldn’t blame them if they didn’t. It’s their bodies. Their sacrifice.”

  Semerjean sighed. “Zack . . .”

  “And what about Hannah?” Zack asked. “You gonna make the same offer to her and Jonathan?”

  Semerjean’s expression turned glum. “I would if I could.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  “Because Jonathan’s dead,” Semerjean told him. “He died seven minutes ago.”

  Carrie covered her mouth with a quivering hand. Mia had to fight the urge to run screaming into the room, clawing and punching at Semerjean’s face. Asshole! You knew he would die! You knew it the whole time you were talking to me!

  “Mia, listen to me . . .”

  There it was again, that woman’s voice that came out of nowhere. Mia looked to Carrie a second time.

  “She can’t hear me,” the stranger told Mia. “None of them can. You have to listen very carefully or more people will die.”

  Zack grabbed a car mirror and threw it to the floor. Glass shards spilled across the concrete.

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t kill him,” Semerjean insisted.

  “You chose him! You brought him into our lives!”

  “Ioni brought him into your lives. If we had our way, you would have never met him.”

  “Fuck you!”

  “It’s Evan you should be angry at. He’s the one who killed Jonathan.”

  “With your blessing.”

  Semerjean shook his head. “I sanctioned no such thing.”

  “Well then, it was your wife or your freak of a son.”

  Semerjean raised a stern finger. “Careful.”

  Esis’s hands frosted over with tempis. “You will not disparage Azral.”

  Mia tried to follow the action through her mirror, but the reflection was . . . changing. Soon the glass became filled with an entirely different image: a pretty young face that Mia had seen once before. They had met briefly last September in an Ohio public library, this strange and chatty girl with two watches on her wrist.

  Ioni met her baffled stare with a look of nervous urgency. “Mia, listen. We don’t have much time. An opportunity has come up and we have to take it.”

  Carrie eyed Mia anxiously as she raised the mirror to her face. “What are you—”

  “Shhhh!”

  “It’s all right,” Ioni told Mia. “I’m shielding you and Carrie from the Pelletiers’ senses. But it won’t last long. You have to work fast.”

  Despite Ioni’s assurance, Mia couldn’t bring herself to speak. All she could do was stammer silently.

  “Look to your left,” Ioni told her.

  Flustered, Mia looked to the wall. Ioni winced. “Sorry. I mean your right. My view’s all backward.
”

  Mia turned her head and saw what Ioni was referring to: a .44 revolver, the one that Semerjean had knocked out of Rebel’s hand.

  “You need to take that gun right now,” Ioni said.

  “And do what?” Mia asked.

  “What?” Carrie asked.

  “I know this is hard, sweetie, but you have to believe me. Inside that gun is the bullet that kills Esis Pelletier. I was hoping that Rebel would be the one to fire it, but he’s gone now. It has to be you.”

  Somewhere, a million miles away, Zack continued to argue with Esis and Semerjean. A fat bead of sweat rolled down Mia’s back, and she couldn’t stop thinking about Jonathan. Like a phantom in her head, he warned her that there would be consequences to shooting Esis. Even if Mia somehow succeeded, she’d still have the wrath of Semerjean to deal with. And if she missed . . .

  “There’ll be blowback,” Ioni admitted. “But I have the power to protect you. The moment you fire that gun, I’ll teleport you and Carrie and everyone else you care about to a safe location. The game will change, but it won’t end today. You have to trust me, Mia. Please!”

  Esis raised her voice. Mia could tell right away that Zack was infuriating her again.

  “The window’s closing!” Ioni said. “Do it!”

  Carrie’s bright eyes went perfectly round as Mia reached for the .44. “What are you doing? Are you crazy?”

  “Aim it,” Ioni yelled. “Aim it and shoot!”

  No one noticed Mia as she stepped in front of the doorway and raised the gun in both hands. Ioni had masked everything: Zack’s eyesight, Esis’s foresight, Semerjean’s razor-keen senses. For a brief, hot moment, Mia existed outside the rules of continuity, a glitch in the software. Time itself seemed to hold its breath as she fixed the trembling gunsight on Esis.

  “Higher,” Ioni urged. “It has to go through her brain.”

  “I can’t do this . . .”

  “You have to.”

  “He’ll spend the rest of his life hunting me.”

  “No he won’t. You’re only killing Esis in one string. And it’s through this string that we’ll save everyone.”